Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.

“For every great song that makes it into the charts and has months of airplay, there are a hundred other songs that are just as good, if not better, which, if sung by the right artist with the right marketing, would be a smash hit,” SoundOut’s Courtier-Dutton said. “It is absolutely, categorically true that there are thousands of songs out there th

The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue.

“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”

“Every bit of consumer research we’ve ever done shows only one consistent thing: Radio is the number one driver of sales and the biggest predictor of a song’s success,” says Dave Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen, which tracks music sales and airplay. “You almost invariably see the biggest songs hit radio first, then pick up [in

Quality, it seems, is a necessary but insufficient attribute for success.

That’s why Simonson and Rosen have named their theory “absolute value.” The Internet, they say, will be a brand-assassinating technology, flooding the world with information and drowning out the signal of advertising for many products.

This way of predicting tastes by aggregating millions of people’s preferences is known as “collaborative filtering”—collaborative because it takes many users’ inputs, and filtering because it uses the data to narrow down the next thing you want to hear.

This is the first thesis of the book. Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.